Family Reunion

Dedication Letter to Reader Title Page PROLOGUE CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN EPILOGUE Copyright

To: The Lyon Family

Scott glanced at the envelope addressed to the family. It should have gone to the executive offices, he thought as he walked away. Then the return address registered.

Judge Nicolette Bechet

He went back and picked up the letter. Nicki—with an address out of the city, in one of the rural parishes.

He fingered the envelope. Curious. A little excited, even.

He had as much right to open it as anyone. So without examining his logic too closely or too scrupulously, he slid a finger beneath the flap of the envelope.

Her signature was full of sweeps and flourishes—not what he would have expected at all.

Scott read the letter six times. She wanted to help the family find Margaret Hollander Lyon. Also, not what he would have expected.

Scott thought of all the dead-end leads that had been followed in the search for his aunt. Maybe he shouldn’t burden the family until he knew more. He could talk to Nicki himself.

After all, he’d waited two years for the chance.

Dear Reader,

How important is family? And how profound are the effects when there are rifts in the family? This final book in THE LYON LEGACY, Family Reunion, explores the way two people are affected by the difficulties in their families and how their struggle to love one another leads to healing.

As I wrote about Scott Lyon and Nicki Bechet, I thought of my own family and how easy it sometimes is to take for granted the ties that bind us—ties of history, of shared memories, of love. I also thought about the “families”

I’ve been blessed to find over the years—women friends, neighbors, my sister writers in the romance community. All of them are valuable, and I made a commitment, as I wrote, to do more to nurture all those connections.

I hope as you read Family Reunion, you’ll also think of your family and be reminded how precious family is.

Happy reading.

Peg Sutherland

www.millsandboon.co.uk

PROLOGUE

March 31, 1997

THE PACK OF about fifty reporters and cameracrew members outside the New Orleans courthouse were hungry. That was how Scott Lyon would have described it. Hungry and circling for the kill.

Scott shifted the Minicam on his left shoulder. He glanced around, uncomfortable with the atmosphere. This felt personal and he knew why—Judge Nicolette Bechet.

Judge Bechet had handed down a controversial decision today in a child abuse case. The unsubstantiated allegations against a popular local politician had gripped the city’s attention. Following as it did so closely on the judge’s personal problems, which had also raised eyebrows and set tongues wagging, Judge Bechet’s handling of the case—and the subsequent jail sentence she’d imposed—had drawn considerable scrutiny.

Now, the judge would be grilled, then roasted on tonight’s late news and on the pages of the morning paper. Standard operating procedure. Nothing to get in an uproar over. Scott knew the drill.

But today, he had some qualms. Today, he kept remembering the haunted look in Judge Nicolette Bechet’s eyes the last time he’d turned his camera on her.

Scott looked up at a second-story window in the sturdy old courthouse. The judge’s office. He remembered its location from the first ambush interview, when he and WDIX-TV’s ace, R. Bailey Ripken, had stormed the judge’s chambers—just two days after her father had died of a drug overdose—and demanded answers to questions they’d had no business asking. The judge had been under siege ever since WDIX broke that story.

Scott regretted his part in exposing her family’s secrets.

The horde of reporters was growing. Growing noisier and restless and more convinced of its right to know with every minute that passed.

Scott eased the camera off his shoulder. It was heavier than usual.

“What?”

That was R. Bailey Ripken. First name Ramona, a closely-guarded secret in journalistic circles; she’d confessed it to him her first week on the job. Scott inspired that kind of trust, especially from women.

“I need a pit stop,” he said. It wasn’t true. He didn’t need to use a washroom. But something was driving him to get out of this mob, something he couldn’t explain to himself, much less to the Crescent City’s exposé queen.

“Now? You’ve got to be kidding? She’s bound to come out any minute!”

“I won’t be long.”

“Scott!”

He was already elbowing his way through the crowd, and was tempted to ditch the pricey camera. He’d heard the disbelief in Bailey’s voice. But what could she do? Have him fired? He smiled grimly to himself. Okay, so sometimes family connections gave a guy the edge.

He’d been around long enough to know better than to march right up to the front door. He’d have the entire gang of reporters right behind him. He went to a side door. He was familiar with the building layout. As he mounted the broad stairs to the second floor, his sneakers squeaking on the well-worn marble, his heart was thumping a little harder than usual. He knew the rules and what he had in mind broke most of them.

Maybe even having the name Lyon on his media credentials wouldn’t save his rear end if this got out.

To hell with it.

He made his way through the little maze of hallways to the judges’ offices. Room 201. A dark oak door, seven-feet high and imposing. Scott realized his fingers were cramping around his camera, he was gripping it that tightly.

What was going on with him, that he was reacting this way, sabotaging his own work? Was this the first sign of burnout? Boredom? Just plain disgust? Or was it, after all, as simple as one man’s instinctive urge to come to the rescue of a woman he wanted to impress?

He opened the door without knocking, slipped in and closed it behind him.

Judge Nicolette Bechet didn’t even seem startled. From her desk, her keen blue eyes zeroed in on his camera and froze. “Leave. Now.”

She was known for her clipped, no-frills style in court. She intimidated a lot of people that way. Scott wasn’t intimidated—he knew the technique. His Aunt Margaret used it well.

“Look out your window.”

She took a breath, her nostrils flaring almost imperceptibly. “You’ve overstepped your bounds, Mr. Lyon.”

She knew his name. He doubted if his family connections bought him much with her.

“I know. Now look out the window, Judge Bechet.”

She remained rigid, her gaze unflinching. A distinctive cleft marked her pointed chin, adding an aura of strength to her face. Her hair was the color of honey, streaked by the sun and pulled back loosely from her narrow face.

Nicolette Bechet wasn’t beautiful, but Scott hadn’t been able to get her off his mind since he’d videotaped her interview with Bailey. Despite her cool, she hadn’t been able to completely hide the haunted look in her wide blue eyes. It wasn’t just the look of a grieving daughter, he’d decided. It went deeper than that.

The probing questions she’d refused to answer during the interview—or in the ten days since, when every reporter in New Orleans had quizzed her over and over—had confirmed Scott’s guess. Judge Bechet had unfinished business in her family. Old business.

“I could very easily have you removed,” she said now with steely control. She spoke precisely, with no hint of her Cajun roots.

“But who’ll remove them?” he asked.

For the first time she seemed to see him as a human being and not merely a video camera on two legs. Her eyes met his, first challenging, then showing just a little uncertainty. Scott again registered the thud of his heartbeat and knew better than to attribute it solely to the fact that he was betraying his colleagues by warning Nicolette Bechet about the media attack awaiting her. No, it was more than that. The judge got under his skin.

“Them?”

He nodded at the window.

She stood slowly. She still wore her robe, open over a dove-gray silk blouse buttoned securely to a little stand-up collar. Gray cuffs showed. Her skirt was black and as she moved from behind her desk in the direction of the window, he saw that it fell a very proper two inches below her knees. Her calves were shapely, even in her nononsense flat-heeled shoes. Trim ankles.

But it was her eyes that made his mouth go dry.

A startling shade of blue and completely unrelenting, they weren’t the windows to any soul he could see, except in those brief moments when she was caught unaware.

She looked out the window, then stiffened. “I see.” She looked back at him. “And you’re here because...?”

“I didn’t think you’d want to be ambushed.”

She made a cynical smile. “And in return...”

He didn’t blame her. He was a television-news cameraman, after all.

“The back exit is clear,” he said. “You can make it to your car that way without running into trouble.”

She studied him. Then very carefully she took off her robe, folded it and draped it over the back of her leather chair. She replaced it with a suit jacket, picked up a briefcase and started for the door. He stood to one side.

“This doesn’t get you anything,” she said. “Not the inside scoop. Not an exclusive. Nothing.”

Her upper lip was delicate and perfectly formed. Her lower lip was full and soft. She didn’t have the look of a woman who wasted time being kissed.

“I don’t expect anything,” he said gruffly.

She didn’t challenge his claim, but her eyes remained filled with skepticism.

She marched down the hall. He wanted to follow her, but couldn’t justify doing so. She didn’t want his protection, and he had no business offering it.

He returned to the pack of reporters and waited with them until someone got word that Judge Nicolette Bechet had given them all the slip. Scott tried not to smile as R. Bailey Ripken contributed to the rash of frustrated profanities that rippled through the throng of reporters. There would be no story tonight.

The next day, however, was a different matter. At a late-afternoon press conference, it was announced that Judge Nicolette Bechet had resigned her post. She wasn’t available for questioning.

Her apartment had been vacated.

CHAPTER ONE

Bayou Sans Fin, November 1999

“SILENCE! Now!”

The cranky cockatiel’s command merely added to the usual morning chaos around the breakfast table at Cachette en Bayou Farm.

Tony and his cousin Toni were perfecting a riff in the song the two were writing for their zydeco band. Beau’s baby girl was demanding attention using the best technique known to six-montholds. Milo the mutt whined for a biscuit; Michel’s current live-in girlfriend whined about her hair. And twelve-year-old Jimmy was practicing his forward pass over everyone’s head, using the six unsuspecting cats as target.

Nicki sighed.

“Quiet!” That was Perdu the cockatiel again, more frantic this time. He made an impatient little skip on Maman Riva’s shoulder. The histrionics, Nicki knew, would serve no good purpose. The Bechet family was a freight train with no brakes.

“We start electrical work this week,” Nicki announced quietly, spooning up a slice of pink grapefruit.

“This one’s a bullet!” Jimmy shrieked. “Watch your noggins.”

Jimmy had not been raised to throw footballs at the breakfast table. This Nicki knew. His side of the family was normal, sane, well behaved. But as soon as they reached Cachette en Bayou, some sort of insanity gene kicked in and they were off and running.

Nicki swallowed the bite of grapefruit. “That means we’ll be without lights. Without refrigerator. Without hot water. Without air-conditioning.” Nobody took any notice of her. She thought wryly of her days on the bench. People had sat up and taken notice when Judge Nicolette Bechet spoke. Those days were gone forever. “It could go on for a week or more.”

Still no reaction. Yet Nicki knew that each and every one of them would look at her after several hours without power and demand to know how she could have sprung this on them without warning.

“This I cannot believe!” Maman Riva said, shaking her head and brushing Perdu’s beak with the fluff of snow-white curls peeking from beneath her purple paisley turban. “Months she is missing and not a word. Outrageous! Scandalous!”

“Shut up!” Perdu demanded, his tone even more strident.

Riva Reynard Bechet waved her cotton napkin in the cockatiel’s face. “Where you learn to talk to your elders that way, you so-and-so? You shut up, you hear?” She surreptitiously dropped a warm biscuit in the vicinity of Milo’s tan-and-gray nose. “You get old, nobody pays you no mind. This is the problem. My problem. Her problem. I try to keep my family in line, nobody pays me mind. She disappears, nobody pays her no mind.”

Riva was still obsessing over the disappearance of Margaret Lyon, the revered matriarch of the Lyons of New Orleans. Every morning since the story had broken in the Times-Picayune a month ago, Riva couldn’t wait to read the latest details. The Lyons seemed to hold some kind of special fascination for her, as if they were royalty.

The Lyons themselves certainly seemed to think so, Nicki thought. But it annoyed her that her own grandmother should have such skewed thinking. Didn’t she remember it was the Lyons and their TV station that had smeared the Bechet name, ruined her career?

Riva may have forgotten, but Nicki definitely had not.

“Perhaps you should stay in town with James and Cheryl while we do the electrical work, Maman,” Nicki said, instead of what she was thinking.

“You’re wanting, I think, to run me off my farm.” Riva didn’t look up from the newspaper. “See here, now, those Lyon scoundrels file junk in the court. They try to steal her TV station. Lord-a-mercy, is a great lot of peril in growing old.”

Junk in the court. Nicki supposed her grandmother meant an injunction of some kind. When it suited her, Riva could be so Cajun she was almost unintelligible to the rest of the world. Riva was sharp, had always run the Bechet family like a benign dictator. Papa Linc Bechet had been no match for her. Even Riva’s two surviving children, Nicki’s aunt Simone and uncle James, couldn’t get her to budge once she’d made up her mind. They kept trying to persuade her to move into town, sell the old farm or, better yet, let them run it.

That was usually when Riva lapsed into dialect and stared at them as if she’d never heard a word of proper English in her life.

The same way she’d been acting for the past six months whenever Nicki tried to have a reasonable conversation with her grandmother about Cachette en Bayou Farm. Riva didn’t want to fix up the farmhouse, which was crumbling around the edges. She didn’t want to sell. She just wanted things to be the way they’d always been. At least that was what Nicki concluded. Maman would not discuss it, so it was virtually impossible to know with any certainty what the eighty-four-year-old woman’s motives were.

“We need to talk about the house, Maman. It’s not going to be habitable for the next week. You should—”

A football landed in the huge pottery bowl of cheese grits. Gasps and giggles and groans broke out, along with howls of outrage aimed at the skinny twelve-year-old future pro quarterback, who should have been in school in the city.

“Why you not in school?” Beau demanded.

“They probably don’t want him around, either,” Tony said.

“Now you leave my Jimmy boy alone.” Riva waved off the comments. “Come here, Jimbo. Give an old lady a thrill.”

The sheepish adolescent gave her a hug. Nicki supposed her youngest cousin was currently in residence at the farm because his mother was having another of her famous migraines. Nicki suspected what incapacitated her uncle James’s society wife had more to do with bourbon than migraines, but she certainly wasn’t about to say so. Nor would anyone else in the family.

Then again, the Bechet family was enough to produce a headache, that much she could vouch for.

“Maman—” Nicki made another attempt “—if you stay with James for the next week, you can help out until Cheryl gets back on her feet, Jimmy wouldn’t miss any school and—”

“You must find Mrs. Lyon.”

Nicki tried not to grind her molars. “Maman, the Lyons do not need my help finding anyone.”

“Oh, but yes. I am thinking they do.”

“Besides which, I am not remotely interested in helping the Lyon family.” The volunteer work Nicki did was dear to her heart. She did searches for people, usually on behalf of adopted children looking for their birth parents. She did it because she knew from personal experience what it felt like to be abandoned.

She did not do it for millionaire families whose toughest decisions centered around whose life to ruin next.

Riva folded the newspaper neatly and clasped her hands on top of it. “Good. This is decided.”

“No, it’s not decided!”

Nicki realized from the silence following her words that she must have raised her voice. Raising one’s voice to Maman Riva was not recommended. Nicki strove to sound reasonable.

“Maman, I have work to do. Renovation work here at the farm—”

Riva shook her head. “Not necessary.”

“It is unless you want the place to fall in on top of you.”

Riva looked around, seemed to consider that possibility. “The boys have their cabin. Simone, she and John are settled. James and Cheryl, they have a big fancy house.” Riva shrugged. “You, you might find a nice man yourself if you had noplace to go. Me, I am old. If it falls on my head, I go on to heaven. Better than this mean old world, where old women disappear and not a body cares.” She reached over, patted Nicki’s hand and smiled the smile no one could resist. “You help find Margaret Lyon, that’s a good girl.”

“They haven’t asked for my help.”

“So you go to them.”

Nicki stared at her grandmother. Riva seemed to have forgotten just who had caused all the upheaval in the Bechet family two years earlier. Nicki would be just as happy if this morning’s headline reported that the entire Lyon family had been sentenced straight to hell with no chance for parole. But she couldn’t say that to her grandmother.

“I have too many search projects already. I—”

“You do good jobs for people,” Riva interrupted, still smiling. “You will do a good job for the Lyons.”

Nicki heard the rattle and chug of the pickup truck belonging to the couple helping with renovations. She stood. “This discussion is over. I have work to do.”

Riva stood and began collecting empty plates. “You call the Lyons. Make your grandmother happy.”

Nicki was accustomed to the fact her grandmother never played fair. Well, let her think she’d won. Nicki had real work to do.

SCOTT LYON LEANED against the wall closest to the conference-room door, one foot propped on an empty chair, his arms crossed tightly over his chest.

He ought to resign from the station.

Hell, he ought to resign from the family.

The morning editorial meetings at WDIX-TV were wearing him down. These days the time was rarely spent assigning stories and scheduling tapings, as it should be. Instead, the meetings disintegrated into bickering as everyone jockeyed for control. He should be used to it by now; it had been this way in the Lyon family all his life. He’d been weaned on his father’s bellyaching that he’d been robbed of his inheritance, a victim of greed and unfairness. Now, thanks to Aunt Margaret’s disappearance and the injunction filed by Scott’s three older brothers—Jason, Raymond and Alain—the ugliness simmering beneath the surface for as long as Scott could remember had exploded to the surface.

Jason, the sales manager at the station, had obviously made it to the conference room first this morning. He occupied the chair at the head of the table, a seat usually reserved for the news director. But the news director wasn’t family. To hear Jason and Alain tell it, even family wasn’t family these days.

“We don’t need to be covering that,” Jason said now about a press conference for a beleaguered city official whose career was drowning in scandal.

The city official was a buddy of Alain, the oldest of the four brothers. Scott pursed his lips to keep from opening his mouth. He didn’t get involved in decisions made by his brothers. He preferred the role of neutral bystander. He pretended not to register the news director’s rolling eyes.

“It’s news,” Bailey Ripken said with illdisguised contempt. “That’s what we do, Jason. Cover news.”

“Are we a tabloid scandal sheet now?” Jason Lyon looked around the table at the assignment editors and reporters who had managed to get the news on the air for years without his assistance or input. “Is that what we’re stooping to? Airing people’s dirty linen? I don’t think so. Lyon Broadcasting stands for more than that. Next story.”

Scott slipped out the door and closed it behind him as the words “journalistic integrity” and “muckraking” filled the air in the tense little conference room.

He stood in the corridor for a minute, working his jaw muscles and battling the urge to walk straight out the front door. He could dig ditches, for God’s sake. Drive a cab. He didn’t have to put up with this.

When he was calm enough to face the world without spitting out some kind of venom he would later regret, Scott made his way to the break room. He inserted quarters into the vending machine and treated himself to a breakfast of hot sweet coffee and two somewhat stale sweet rolls. He wolfed them down, barely noticing the taste.

His coffee had just gotten cool enough to drink when his cousin André walked into the break room. The hum of conversation quieted with the presence of the station’s embattled general manager.

André Lyon looked embattled, all right. At fifty-eight, he had always been tall and square-shouldered. But Scott thought his cousin’s shoulders had begun to sag with the weight of all that had happened since the station’s fiftieth anniversary this past summer. First, André’s father and co-founder of WDIX-TV, Paul Lyon, had died. Then, the day of the funeral, André’s mother had vanished. Most everyone had assumed that Margaret Lyon simply needed to get away from the glare of publicity, find a quiet spot to grieve and let go of the man with whom she’d shared her life and founded a broadcasting dynasty.

Then signs began to point to the possibility of foul play.

And in the midst of absorbing that emotional blow, the family had received another: Jason, Raymond and Alain were challenging Paul Lyon’s will in court. André wasn’t the rightful heir, they claimed. He wasn’t a Lyon and they swore they had the documentation to prove it.

Scott was incredulous, and ashamed that his own brothers would pull such a disgusting stunt. The rest of the family was equally stunned. And Andre, it appeared to Scott, had been nearly broken by the series of events.

Breathing out a heavy sigh, Scott took his litter to the trash bin beside the machines. André looked up as he passed. His once decisive and calm face looked distracted.

“Oh, Scott. How goes it? News conference already over?”

Rising to the occasion, trying to sound normal. Scott had to respect that in his cousin. It was one of the things he’d always admired in Aunt Margaret, too. His own side of the Lyon family should take a lesson.